IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 58

Latin American and Caribbean
Afro-Descendants in 2015
An assessment of progress among Afro-Descendant Communities in
2015 and the start of the U.N. International Decade for People of African Descent: Some considerations about the current situation
Omer Freixa
Africanist historian (UBA-UNTREF)
Instructor and researcher at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Tres de Febrero
Professor, Higher Council on Catholic Education
Buenos Aires, Argentina
acking official support, the Second International Afro-Descendants’ Colloquium
(November 25-29) concluded in Oaxaca, Mexico, as the greatest event of 2015
for Latin America and the Caribbean, in the area of the region’s AfroDescendants.

L

A few outstanding facts
Latin American and Caribbean Afrodescendants number about 150 million;
they are between 15.6% and 30% of the
demographic territory’s composition,
almost 635 million Latin Americans and
Caribbean in total, according to CEPAL.
The number reported by the United Nations, UNICEF and Uruguayan organization Organizaciones del Mundo Negro is
at least 80 million. In Brazil, the country
that leads the region in the number of
Afro-descendants, the official percentage
is 45%, followed by Cuba (35%), Colombia (11%), and Ecuador (5%). The
series of censuses that were carried out
in eight countries, in the year 2000, offered more precise ciphers: 84.8 million,
of which 75.8 are Brazilian, 4.3 million

are Colombian, 3.9 million are Cuban,
and .6 million are Ecuadorean. After
them, in order of magnitude, come Costa
Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, where the Afro presence is hardly
2%. The problem resides in the fact that
there were still Afro-descendants censuses in various countries in the works,
in around the year 2000, some of them
with large populations, like Venezuela
and Uruguay, and Argentina and Bolivia
to a lesser degree. Even so, the significant Afro population of Latin America
and the Caribbean is the product of the
legacy of the region’s complex history,
one in which the colonial period cemented (and later successfully maintained) a
society born of three roots: European,
native, and Afro. The last component of

58